Rifkin: 'I have nothing to do with' victims

(Editor's Note: The following article ran in the April 15 edition of Newsday, a daily newspaper that serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island.Denton Publications editor Jeremiah S. Papineau was asked by Newsday to interview Joel Rifkin, a convicted serial killer currently serving a life sentence at the ClintonCorrectional Facility in Dannemora.)

DANNEMORA - Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin said Thursday, April 14, none of the skeletal remains found recently in the expanding Gilgo Beach murder investigation were victims of his.

"I have nothing to do with those bodies," he said matter-of-factly during an interview at the maximum-security prison where he's locked up for life.

Rifkin confessed to killing 17 women from the late 1980s into the early '90s. Four of the bodies were never found.

But Rifkin told Newsday that the South Shore barrier island where the remains of as many as 10 possible victims have turned up since December was not one of his dumping grounds. It is not yet known how long the most recently found remains had been there.

Rifkin, 52, spoke for more than an hour at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., a remote village about 20 miles from the Canadian border.

The former horticulturist wore a green prison jumpsuit. His graying hair was combed back in a ponytail. He wears bifocals and sports a goatee. He doesn't raise his voice when he speaks and, despite his crimes, he is unrestrained by handcuffs or chains when he meets guests at a visiting area.

Rifkin has been following the Gilgo Beach case through television news and has his own theory - at least regarding the four women who worked as prostitutes whose remains were the first to turn up in the brush off Ocean Parkway in Suffolk County.